The population, whether private individuals, businesses, governmental entities, charitable organizations, etcetera, has many mailing and shipping (collectively referred to as shipping) needs. For example, persons may have a need to post documents, books, parcels, etcetera via a postal service (e.g., the United States Postal Service (USPS)), an express courier service (e.g., Federal Express, DHL, or Purolator Courier), a parcel service (e.g., United Parcel Service (UPS)), and/or the like (collectively referred to as shipping services). Various considerations, such as pickup and delivery times, cost, size and weight restrictions, parcel content restrictions, etcetera may influence or even dictate a person's selection of a particular shipping service.
Many solutions have been developed to facilitate a person's ability to use a shipping service. Recently, with the advent of computers, and their becoming nearly ubiquitous in many societies, sophisticated automated solutions have been developed to assist persons in various aspects of a shipping task, including determining a proper cost for shipping, generating a shipping label, generating a shipping manifest, generating a postage indicia or other proof of payment for services, logging a shipment, tracking a shipment, etcetera. For example, on-line generation of postage indicia and associated services, including shipping label generation, account management, and tracking, are provided by systems of Stamps.com, Inc., the assignee of the present application. On-line generation of a shipping label, including information for billing the shipping services, and tracking are provided by systems of FedEx Express, Inc. Similarly, on-line generation of a shipping label, including information for billing the shipping services, and tracking are provided by systems of United Parcel Service of America, Inc. These have provided excellent stand-alone shipping solutions, but typically have not addressed multiple shipping provider comparison and selection and have generally lacked integration with other applications.
There are a large number of persons wherein Internet or World Wide Web interaction is the source of transactions requiring shipping. For example, an electronic mail (“e-mail”) message received through a web service such as Hotmail™ or Yahoo!™ Mail may precipitate shipping a document or parcel. Similarly, an electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) transaction, such as may be made through an Internet store or auction site, may precipitate shipping a parcel.
Although most web sites provide no interface to shipping applications, several web sites have begun to vertically integrate services and thus have provided an interface to one or more shipping applications. For example, the popular Internet auction site eBay™ includes buttons on certain web pages to allow a user to select and initiate a shipping application for generating shipping labels, generating postage indicia, etcetera. For example, a user is allowed to select between the USPS and UPS for shipping an item after the conclusion of an eBay™ auction. These two shipping applications, however, are separate and do not provide any form of shipping provider comparison. Moreover, the shipping accounts used with respect to these shipping applications are unique, such that even if the user already has a shipping account with either or both of these shipping providers that account is not accessed. Where the user has shipping accounts with other such Internet sites, the number of accounts becomes extremely difficult to manage.
A user with a shipping account for eBay™ and an online postage account with an Internet postage provider, for example, can not use the same postage account on the back end for all their shipping labels unless the user foregoes the shipping interface provided by eBay™ and instead separately uses the Internet postage provider's application directly. However, to use such a separate application, the user will be required to input any desired data, such as name, address, etcetera, otherwise available from eBay™, or at least electronically cut and paste such data from the eBay™ site into an appropriate field in the separate application. Similarly, if a user receives shipping information via e-mail, with current shipping applications the user will be required to input or copy and paste the information from the e-mail client into the shipping application.
Accordingly, there is a need for a wider variety of shipping solutions, and in particular shipping solutions which are not custom to every Internet site. A further need exists for shipping solutions which allow a user to select a shipping provider of choice, regardless of a particular Internet site precipitating the shipping event. A still further need exists for a user to be enabled to readily use a same shipping account with respect to shipping events precipitated from different Internet sites. A further need exists for information with respect to the context of a shipment, such as an item shipped, to be automatically obtained and/or saved in association with shipping account information or other shipping application information.